assessment

As with many educators I have grappled with the purpose of assessment for some time. It often feels as though we are subjecting our learners to tests and assessments that serve no purpose other than to generate an arbitrary score that could be quite different if they sat the test tomorrow, and yet these situations induce anxiety and stress for teachers, learners, and families.

So a burning question for me is around the issue of assessment and measurement. Are we measuring the things that we value? Do we value that which we are measuring?

For 9 years New Zealand teachers have been required to measure students in relation to ‘national standards’ for reading, writing, and maths. This information was then required to be reported to parents, the Board of Trustees of each school and the Ministry of Education using language such as ‘below standard’, ‘at standard’, or ‘above standard’. Many educators and researchers (Ken Robinson, Tony Wagner, Guy Claxton) in the field of education have shown us that the skills and capabilities our students need for their futures are much broader than the national standards focus we have had in New Zealand for the past decade. This narrow focus created a difficult environment for teachers who worked hard to ‘shift’ students in relation to these standards very often at the expense of sciences, arts, technology, sports, etc. Whilst at the same time creating angst for the learner, families and indeed themselves.

Late in 2017 New Zealand teachers and leaders were given an opportunity to rethink ‘assessment’ in our schools. With a change of government came a change in the legislation governing schools and we are no longer required to measure or report student progress in relation to the ‘national standards’. This has given leaders and teachers at Paekākāriki School the scope to move forward with a skills and competencies based curriculum that was, in 2017, in its early stages of development.

The process of developing the skills and competencies based curriculum began with extensive community consultation in 2016 as it was clear to the Board of Trustees that a strong vision for learning at Paekākāriki School was needed. Paekākāriki is a small village and it was important to us that our school reflected the village values and philosophies. The community consultation in 2016 provided us with great information about what our community wanted for their children at our school, we began to see a clear picture of the experiences, skills, and capabilities that were valued by our community. By the end of 2016, we had disseminated this rich information into 4 guiding principles and had established a new vision for ourselves as the Home of the Barefoot Learner.

During 2017 we took the 4 guiding principles of belonging, connecting, exploring and thriving, and broke them down into key skills and capabilities for our learners. We were able to align these with the New Zealand Curriculum Key Competencies. This, in effect, gave us our ‘graduate profile’ and has enabled us to develop our own local curriculum based around these.

The capabilities are outlined as a series of progressions in our Barefoot Learner matrix against which we measure and report on student progress. These progressions were collaboratively developed with teachers and students. These capabilities have signalled a shift to students taking ownership of their learning – learner agency and responsibility are frequent conversations. They also give us a meaningful tool for measuring and reporting on the things that our community values for their children’s education. Student’s use the progressions to self assess, teachers use them to measure progress and our next step is to ensure that quality evidence is shared for each progression with families. We have a digital platform that allows a range of evidence to be shared in real time, and seeking family feedback on this evidence is a next step for us.

These capabilities are more far reaching than the traditional reading, writing, math achievement data and so we are still in the process of refining our systems to measure and report on these. Informing parents of this process is also important. We have developed a curriculum where we focus on the skills and qualities they identified as being important, our next challenge is to be able to demonstrate progress against these things.

As with any programme of change we needed to consider how we deliver this strong and clear vision to our community. We’ve been pleased with the reaction from the community to our Home of the Barefoot Learner vision and it seems to ring true with our community and visitors to our village. It is a continuing journey for us to embed this vision and a common language across the school, in all that we do so that everyone knows and understands us. Making the guiding principles known and understood widely, and making explicit the links to the curriculum is an ongoing process for us.

After a period of implementation, we will need to re-evaluate. As part of our self review process we need to ask questions of our students, teachers, board and families;

Have we considered everything that is important for our student’s futures?

Do we value the things we are measuring?

Or, are we still assessing that which we don’t value?

I’d love the chance to chat with you about this and other topics during my presentations at the Leading a Digital School Conference.

I sat in a taxi in Sydney last year, on my way to indulge in another large helping of steamed dumplings in my quest to try all of the top 8 dumpling restaurants Sydney has to offer. (as voted by website Concrete Playground). The taxi driver was a middle aged gentleman of Greek origin. I asked him about his opinion of Uber. Did he hate them? Had business slowed since their inclusion into the market? etc. He told me to open his glove box. To my surprise, within the glovebox was his Uber identification tag. He had a foot in each camp! He had accepted that Uber was here to stay and slumping in his seat and complaining about it wasn’t going to get his bills paid. To cut a long story short the main learning I took away from this interaction is that we can choose to take one of two options. Embrace the trends or fight the trends.

This train of thought is something I have always sort of followed but never really embraced. The taxi driver had inspired me to not only embrace the trends but to accelerate them. Make them my own and use them to my advantage in an educational setting. Things like the bottle flip, dabbing, fidget spinners, memes etc. have been banned in some schools, whereas I see them as an opportunity to teach projectile motion, angles of a triangle, reflection or a relevant way to bring up and discuss social inequity, assumptions and bias.

An example of an educator who is not embracing trends. (used with permission from Mr. Jones online from Teachers pay teachers)

This is where social media comes in. Do we embrace it, or do we fight it?

For me it is a no brainer. After meeting this motivational taxi/ Uber driver I set myself the goal to use Social media as a means for assessment, both in a formative and summative manner.

These are some of the success stories.

Formative assessment:

This was an important one for allowing me to check the students understanding of the content. It was an excellent way to transition the move from the ‘individual’ to the ‘group’ space of the flipped classroom.

I instructed the students to use Snapchat for this. I asked them to summarise or take key points from a video, complete a two truths one lie, do a three level reading guide on a text or any sort of activity where they needed to think about and exhibit an understanding of the content. Once they had created a video using Snapchat they were to save it to their camera roll and then post it onto our class Facebook page. The buy in from students was excellent. Feedback from the class showed that they didn’t mind putting themselves out there for others to see when there was a fun element to it, when they could use a filter to disguise their faces and their voices, and when they could quickly check any notifications they had.

Some examples of students who have used Snapchat filters to record their responses. (used with permission from the students)

Facebook obviously allows you to post videos and other content to your classroom group. I will often put up a video or a link to an article and ask the students to leave a comment which shows their understanding. This allows the students to learn off each other, especially if you have the students in some sort of ability grouping. Students who are lower ability might only need to make a literal statement directly from the text or video whereas someone of a higher ability may be asked to write a comment from a much more critical lens. Going ‘live’ and the new ‘watch party’ feature on Facebook have opened up other avenues of viewing content as a class and could prove to be very useful in the future. Colleagues of mine have set up a Facebook chat for homework where students have had to meet online at a certain time and talk about a specific topic. Although this was optional, it had excellent buy in from the students and some valuable learning came from it.

Summative assessment:

Many sportsmen and sportswomen are setting up “athlete” Facebook pages. Even people who have only been going to the gym for a week or two are setting up fitness based Instagram and Facebook pages too.

This made me think about how I could use the same format for my students. Being a PE teacher who is teaching contextualised courses which are based around improving a students own ability in a sport, it was easy to follow the “athlete” page model. Students had to create a profile, using their school email address as their login. They could make it a page or group depending on whether or not they wanted to keep it private. They could also choose not to make it public or not to publish it at all. This worked particularly well for an assessment where the students had to reflect on their participation in an activity and discuss the factors involved. Typically they would have done this in a diary type format but Facebook allowed them to post their response immediately and also gave them the option of adding in video and photos as evidence. I have seen the same standards being assessed in a similar way on Instagram. Any sort of assessment that requires a portfolio of evidence could be used here.

An example of a post from a students “athlete” page. It is a reflection of their use of interpersonal skills throughout a lesson.

Some of my colleagues from the English department followed suit and allowed their students to set up a Facebook page on which they critiqued the books they were reading and completed reading responses.

I have also seen public pages created by students which contain information about a set topic. The page itself is the assessment and the student needs to have a certain number of resources, posts etc. Making a page designed to create change in a community is a possibility for a number of Health based topics.

These are just a couple of ways that you can use social media to enhance your classroom practice. At the end of the day student buy in is a very important part of being successful on a day to day basis. Using tools, techniques and technology that students are familiar and comfortable with can be a big positive. When a new trend comes along think about how you might be able to use it to your advantage, don’t be scared of it. Go with the trends and don’t concern yourself with what cannot be controlled. Embrace the trends and make them your own!